I saw this over on facebook. If someone can call their baby Moonunit or Chastity, I don't see how Messiah is a problem. Lots of latinos are named Jesus (pronounced Hay-soos in Spanish). This judge (and whomever reported them) has a problem.

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If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.

The judge should have called him Sue. He'll need to grow up tough and all that jazz.

Other countries have rules much worse than this. In Norway, a guy wanted to change his name to Harley Davidson (he was obviously a motorcycle nut), but they made him change it to Harley Davidsen (note the 'e' rather than an 'o') because Norway ends such names with the 'en' while those lousy Swedes use 'on'. And they like keeping things different.

Not the same thing, and perhaps not quite as stupid a reason, but at least it isn't without precedence.

On the bright side, when the kids joins this site in 15 or 16 years as an atheist, his first name will be easier for him to live with.

But the judge was an asshole. It isn't his call. Especially his reasoning. And especially since there used to be lots of people calling themselves the messiah. Even before Facebook. But hey, maybe this will be the worst thing that ever happens to the kid, and he'll end up being pretty happy because of it.

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Anyone can beat around the bush. But unless you have permission from the bush, you probably shouldn't.

Don't know whether the parents will have any interest in appealing, but if they do, this will almost certainly be thrown out. Laws on this vary from state to state here in the US, but for the most part, state law says that you can change your name to anything you want to, so long as it's not for any unlawful purpose (such as trying to evade people you owe money to). The bar is higher in some states than in others -- for example, a college friend of mine from a different state had to appear in court and explain to a judge why he wanted to change his name, whereas I only had to fill out some forms, notarize them, and run a legal notice in the newspaper. So long as you meet those minimal requirements, though, courts have almost always ruled in favor of the name change, even in cases like Prince, who filed to have his name changed to a symbol that had no pronunciation.[1]

It is the judge's overtly religious reasoning that is wildly inappropriate here. It wasn't about the child's future or the reason for the name--it was about his personal religious beliefs. He should lose his job!